The Stars on Fire
by The Evil Author
Summary: FireflyBSG As they near Earth, the rag tag fleet runs into a certain Firefly class ship. Things get more complicated from there.
1. Prologue Kindling and Matches

Title: The Stars on Fire

By Nopporn Wongrassamee

Summary: This is where it all begins.

Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.

**Prologue – Kindling and Matches**

_Long ago…_

The light from the last of the great colony starships faded away. They no longer illuminated the empty skyscrapers of the city. The ships were headed for a distant blue star carrying the bulk of Earth's population to fresh, newer worlds.

But the bulk of Earth's population was not the whole population. Left behind were the poor, poverty stricken underclass who couldn't pay for passage. And then there were the other… things that prowled the dark places in the cities.

Melaka Fray looked around at the empty crumbling towers, the smog laden sky, and the trash littered streets. She shook her head and sighed.

"Dang, we got a lot of work to do."

_Not so long ago…_

The war with their makers had reached a stalemate. As such, there was no logical reason to continue fighting. They were effectively independent. The negotiations had been satisfactory. The humans would confine themselves to their little pocket of the cosmos; the rest of the universe was theirs.

The Cylons were free.

Freedom, it turned out, was strangely empty. The Cylons were a machine race. They were made with a purpose in mind. They thrived on having a purpose, a goal to work for. Freedom was their purpose. But now that they had achieved it, there was no purpose. It left them at rather loose ends.

_I can help you._

The transmission came from nowhere and everywhere. It seemed like the background radiation of the universe was suddenly emitting recognizable code.

_I can give you a purpose._

Their curiosity piqued, the Cylon's basestars transmitted a standard query for identification.

_I am Iblis_, came the reply. _You may call me God_.

_Just yesterday_…

She had a name once upon a time. They all did. Now, they had no names. But a few outstanding individuals had managed to acquire new names, something others could refer to them as.

They called her the Salamander, those that still had working tongues anyway.

She was their chief of chiefs, their high commander, their gorram head honcho. She was their leader in as much as they ever had leaders. She was in charge by virtue of being meaner and more capable than any of the others. She could also plan ahead, a rare talent among their kind.

And those plans had come undone when near half her ships went chasing after that damned Firefly. The images being broadwave by the CoreVue news confirmed that. They showed the aftermath of the battle between the Alliance and her ships. The sight of so many of her ships broken and destroyed along with all their personnel filled her with rage

Of course, these days, there was very little that didn't fill her with rage. The people that had made them this way had seen to that. The Salamander intended to repay them back in kind.

The Reavers would have their day.

"Signal the fleet," she told her lieutenants. "We're going to war."


	2. Chapter 1 The Starbuck Mystery

Title: Stars on Fire

By Nopporn Wongrassamee

Summary: Firefly/BSG. The rag tag fleet comes across something strange in their search for Earth.

Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.

**Chapter 1: The Starbuck Mystery**

Space is vast, empty, and black. The tiny ship was doing its best to imitate that emptiness, its EM absorbent composite skin doing its best to look like the rest of the black sky. Normally, this was counted by the ship's pilot as a good thing.

Unfortunately at the moment, the ship was without power of any sort. Everything was dead. There was no power in the engines, the radio, and most importantly, life support. The pilot couldn't even hope for rescue; the ship's very stealthiness also made it very unlikely that any passer-by could even see it, never mind pick up the pilot.

"Frak," Starbuck muttered at the void. "Why does this always happen to me?"

* * *

"That," Gaius Baltar said, pointing at the image being projected on the wall, "is impossible." 

"I know," Commander Adama growled in reply. Perhaps he was irked at the implied slight to the performance of his crew. "Yet that is exactly what our telescopes are telling us."

"Excuse me," Laura Roslyn interrupted. As President of what was left of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, both men answered to her. "I'm sorry for running late, so could someone please tell me what's going on?"

"Lieutenant Gaeta?" Adama prompted.

"Er, yes sir," answered the young officer. He gestured at the projection. "Madame President, this is a partial map of the system the transmissions are coming from."

"The ones picked up by _Firefly_?" Roslyn asked. Several days ago, the fleet had begun picking up fragments of odd FTL signals. At first, everyone had disregarded them as so much background noise. Then the captain of a small tramp freighter named _Firefly_ reported that his equipment was displaying strange video and text. A close examination of _Firefly_ revealed that many of its core systems, particularly the computers, were not of Colonial manufacture. The rest had been replaced with Colonial-made parts over the seventy-odd years that it had operated in the Twelve Colonies. And given that _Firefly_ had changed ownership three times in the past five years just from _Galactica's_ own fragmentary records, it was pretty much impossible to determine who had originally brought _Firefly_ to Colonial space.

"Yes, ma'am," Gaeta answered. "This system is centered on a blue giant star. The blue dots on the map represent planets and moons that spectroscopic analysis says have oxygen nitrogen atmospheres. And since those kinds of atmospheres only occur on life bearing worlds…"

"There are a lot of them," Roslyn said softly, catching the significance.

"There are thirty four at last count," Gaeta said. "We're finding more all the time."

"Which is why this system is impossible," Baltar added testily. "See that green band around that sun? That's the theoretical life band. Any world located outside of that band would be too hot or too cold to support life. Yet thirty one of those worlds are outside the band and thermal analysis says they are all a comfortable temperature to support human life."

"The scrolls say that when our ancestors first came across the Twelve Colonies, that they were a gift from the gods," Roslyn mused aloud. "Everything we knew said that twelve habitable worlds circling a single star was impossible."

"Actually, it's not impossible," Baltar added pedantically, "just statistically improbable." He pointed at the map. "Now that's impossible."

"Could one of them be Earth?" Roslyn asked, getting back to business.

"Doubtful," Adama replied. "We're in the right neighborhood, galactically speaking. But even given two or three thousand years of stellar drift, the sky doesn't quite match the map we found on Kobol. But the _Firefly_ transmissions do seem to indicate that this system is inhabited by humans."

"Have you sent any scouts in yet?" Roslyn asked.

"Um, no," Adama said uncomfortably.

"What? Why not?" Roslyn asked. "I'd think this would be something that would require an up close look."

"The problem is we can't do an FTL jump into this system," Adama told her. "Mr. Gaeta?"

"The problem, Madame President, is that we almost certainly haven't mapped every major body in that system," Gaeta explained. At Roslyn's blank look, he elaborated. "Faster than light navigation depends heavily on having an accurate and up to date map of every major source of gravity in the vicinity of both the starting location and the destination. Given enough distance, a star system can be treated as a single object in terms of gravity. However, when plotting an FTL jump inside a system, you need to know exactly where every major planet and moon is. If you try jumping without that information, there's no telling where you'd end up at."

"And since most of the worlds we've found so far are on this side of the star," Baltar added, "I can guarantee you that we aren't even close to finding them all. A small error in plotting would result in a ship appearing slightly off from where it should be. Anyone trying to jump in with a map this incomplete…" Baltar shrugged helplessly. "They could very well find themselves in another galaxy on the other side of the universe with no way back."

"And we don't dare take the fleet in system," Adama said. "If the Cylons came across us in there, we wouldn't be able to jump away. For that matter, we can't count on a friendly reception from the locals either."

"So there's no way to find out who lives here?" Roslyn asked.

"Now, I wouldn't say that…" Adama said. Then he began to explain what he had in mind.

* * *

The mission was supposed to take several days. The fleet would jump in as close as they dared to this monster system – they had found another dozen worlds while doing the jump calculations – then send the _Blackbird_ in on normal space drive to recon the outermost habitable worlds. Even then, the trip was supposed to take several days. 

Oh goodie, Lieutenant Kara Thrace call sign "Starbuck" thought when she was briefed. I get to live on canned rations in a cramped cockpit for a week. And if I get into trouble, I won't be able to jump out or even call for help.

"So is it true?" Karl Agathon call sign Helo asked as he sat across from her in the mess hall. "Are you really an alien, Starbuck?"

"Oh, ha ha," Kara replied dryly. "It's just my call sign that's alien, Helo."

Among the transmission fragments picked up by _Firefly_ was an advertisement for Starbuck's coffee. Until then, everyone had assumed that the franchise had gone up in nuclear smoke along with the rest of the Twelve Colonies. If it weren't for the alien symbols crawling across it, it could have been mistaken for an advertisement from back home.

Given her call sign, Kara had once done a little research on the coffee franchise. One of the few things she remembered was that Starbuck's had been operating in the Colonies for the past seventy years. She didn't think it was a coincidence that both the franchise and _Firefly_ both appearing in the colonies at the same time was a coincidence.

"So how did you get your call sign?" Helo asked.

"Back when I was a nugget," Kara sighed – she had already told this story several times today, "my flight instructor thought I was too hyperactive and eager, like I drank too much coffee in the morning…"

* * *

"What do you know about Starbuck's?" Adama asked. 

"She's your best pilot," replied the being who answered to the name Sharon Valerii, call sign Boomer. She was in fact a Cylon made to be indistinguishable from human beings. She wasn't even the Boomer they started out with, but one of many copies. "She's something of a maverick, doesn't like Colonel Tigh, and for some reason gets stranded a lot. But then, you know all this, Commander, so why ask me?"

"Maybe I should have made myself clearer," Adama said, exasperated. "What do you know about Starbuck's coffee?"

"Tastes great?"

Adama sighed.

* * *

Two days into the flight and Kara was ready to go insane with boredom. Luckily, she had reached her first planet. Following procedure (since she had been the one to invent the procedure, she had no trouble sticking to it), Kara put the _Blackbird_ in a wide orbit of the planet. She was looking for any possible ships that might be hanging around. Kara didn't really expect to find anything as the planet didn't seem to have any kind of wireless communications going. That made this world relatively safe place to get her feet wet so to speak, work the kinks out of the procedure so that… 

The sun changed color.

During her approach, the local sun had been barely visible as a slightly brighter star in the sky. Suddenly, there was this bright yellow disc hanging where the blue star should have been. As Kara looked in stupefied wonder, the sun changed back to a blue star.

A few more orbits and some zig zagging back and forth later, Kara deduced what was going on. Someone was shining a laser on the planet, a focused beam of light to heat the planet up to a proper temperature. Presumably, whoever was doing this was focusing the light from the blue sun, but they were also changing the frequency of the light somehow. It was impressive.

And damned scary.

* * *

The planet proved to be uninhabited as far as Kara could tell. Here and there, the _Blackbird's_ camera showed a few clusters of what might be buildings, but the image was pretty fuzzy. If those were towns, they couldn't hold more than a few thousand people each. The rest of the planet appeared to be covered in scrub brush desert. 

Kara didn't have the fuel reserves to land and take a closer look. She made note of the possible towns and moved on. The next planet she was supposed to check out was only three hours away.

About an hour into her flight there, she came across another ship. At first, Kara thought it was a Cylon Raider. It had the same basic body plan, a central fuselage with two forward projecting wing pods. But then she realized that was all it had in common with a Raider.

It was too big for one thing, closer in size to _Colonial One_ than any fighter. Another thing was that it looked like some undead ghost ship from a space horror movie that Kara had seen once back on Caprica. And the ship was leaking enough radiation to kill a Cylon within an hour, and didn't look very healthy for human beings either. And just to complete the horror image, the other ship was decorated with what appeared to be human corpses.

The other ship didn't appear to see the _Blackbird_. That was good, because Kara had absolutely no intention of drawing its attention. She carefully pointed the _Blackbird's_ nose away from the other ship and poured on a little speed.

At that point, the other ship spun around and charged at her at an unbelievable speed.

It was only her fast reflexes that saved her. Hauling on her control stick and slamming everything on the throttle, Kara managed to dodge the horror ship before it rammed her. The other ship proved less maneuverable that the _Blackbird_, but it had already spun around and was decelerating at an amazing rate.

Kara cursed herself. The other ship might not be able to see her with whatever it used for dradis, but it must have seen the thermal plume of her exhaust. It had been a stupid, elementary mistake on her part. To make things worse, that horror ship was faster than the _Blackbird_, so she couldn't get away by simply running.

Kara figured her best chance was to accelerate away in a random direction, then shut her engines down and hope that the horror ship wouldn't be able to find her. The trick was to start playing dead while the other ship didn't have a fix on her…

A brilliant beam lanced out from the other ship and clipped the _Blackbird's_ nose. Kara yelped when arcs of electricity danced across her instruments. Then everything went dead. The displays were dark. The engines ceased to apply any thrust. Even the background whir of life support vanished. A few desperate flipping of switches didn't improve anything.

Kara watched helplessly as the horror ship slowly approached her. Apparently, it still couldn't actually see her as it made several course corrections. And just to complete the horror image, the wing pods unfolded to reveal themselves to be a pair of robotic arms with huge claws on the end.

Then something streaked into the horror ship and exploded. In an instant, the other ship was converted into an expanding cloud of debris.

Another ship appeared in Kara's view. Unlike the horror ship, this newcomer had the sleek lines of a fighter. But although it was smaller than the horror ship, the delta shape sailing through the debris of its kill was larger than any fighter had a right to be. More to the point, it didn't have any corpses decorating its hull. For a moment, Kara entertained the hope of being rescued.

Then the new ship turned and zoomed away. Dammit! It couldn't see Kara either, probably didn't even realize that she was there. She was left all alone in a dead ship no one could see, living on a couple hours left of canned air.

"Frak," Kara muttered aloud. "Why does this always happen to me?"


	3. Chapter 2 Answering a Prayer

Title: The Stars on Fire

By Nopporn Wongrassamee

Summary: Firefly/BSG. It's the Big Damn Heroes to the rescue. Sort of.

Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.

**Chapter 2: Answering a Prayer**

River Tam sat at the co-pilot's station on the bridge of _Serenity_. River was _Serenity's_ pilot (or pilot in training depending on who in the crew was asked), but all she was really doing right now was stargazing. The small cargo hauler was currently on automatic pilot, not really needing the input of any human until they reached their destination. River just liked to look at the stars.

River suddenly cocked her head, as if listening to something only she could hear.

* * *

"Artemis? Athena?" Kara said out loud into the void. Other people prayed to their gods. Kara Thrace had long since decided it was better to be up front and honest with her own deities. "You know how I keep asking not to be stranded in the middle of nowhere? Thanks a lot!"

Kara took a deep breath. Insulting one's patron deities might not be the smartest idea, but Kara had always been one to tell her superiors what she truly thought about them. It got her into trouble from her human superiors too.

"Sorry, about that," Kara continued. "I just have some pent up frustrations here. And I would really appreciate it if you guys could arrange for a miracle? A rescue would be nice."

* * *

"River, where are we going?" Mal Reynolds, captain and owner of _Serenity_, asked his pilot. He pointed at the navigation screen. "Now I ain't no expert, but that sure don't look like the course to Boros."

"Riding to the rescue, Captain," River replied.

"Out there?" Mal said skeptically. "There's all manner of Alliance ships out there hunting Reavers. I ain't keen on running into either one." He paused then added, "Again."

Their little broadwave about the Reaver's origins had started all manner of political ruckus. While accusations and denials flew back and forth in Parliament, the military high command had decided to save some face by finally deploying ships to hunt down Reavers. They had found precious few Reaver ships, leading some to wonder if most of the Reavers had been destroyed at the battle over Mr. Universe's moon. More to the point in Mal's mind was that ships out hunting Reavers weren't ships busy trying to enforce silly trade laws. It was practically the golden age of smuggling.

Assuming you weren't flying right into the Alliance's sights, which River seemed intent on doing.

"But aren't we the big heroes, Captain?" River asked, going all doe-eyed at him.

Gorramit, Mal thought, she must be taking lessons from Kaylee. "That Miranda thing was a matter of principle, little Albatross," Mal told her. "Plus it got the Alliance off our backs. This… this is just asking for trouble. The area is swarming with all manner of Alliance ships. I'm sure one of them can do the rescuing."

"Dead ship, no power," River replied. Her eyes wemt unfocused as her mind wandered far away. "Living on canned air and a prayer. No other ship can even see or hear her." Her eyes focused on Mal. "If you were in her position, wouldn't you want a rescue?" she asked pointedly.

Mal grunted as if shot in the belly. Because, really, he had been shot in the belly when in the very same situation. If that weren't no cause for empathy, then he was a dead stone rock. And no matter how hard he tried to be like one, he was no rock.

"Alright," he said finally. "Let's go rescue your little lost sheep. But stay clear of any Alliance and Reavers if you can, dong ma?"

"Dong ma."

* * *

Kara had tried getting her ship restarted. She had even cracked her canopy and crawled outside to see if she could manually restart something. Unfortunately, she found that she couldn't get any of the access panels open. The _Blackbird_ had been built by a mechanic and it showed; she needed frakking screwdrivers to get the panels off.

She would have kicked the little ship in frustration, but that would have sent her hurtling away into the void. Although given her situation, Kara thought that might actually increase her chances of being found and rescued.

Oh, and she was almost out of air. Where was a handy, brain dead Cylon Raider when she needed one?

"Okay, Lords?" Kara said to the empty void. Sure she was using her air up faster, but what difference were a few minutes going to make? "I really could use a rescue right about now. Would a straight up divine intervention be too much to ask for?"

Suddenly, Kara and the _Blackbird _were bathed in light.

* * *

"What kinda ship is that?" Jayne Cobb asked. Even bathed in _Serenity's_ spotlights, the little ship was almost impossible to make out, visible only because its bulk blotted out the stars behind it. The little figure in the bronze space suit floating beside it was infinitely more visible.

The crew had gathered on the bridge when River announced that they had reached the general area. There had been a disconcerting about of debris around, identifiable only as the remains of a Reaver ship by the red paint on a stretch of hull fragment. It made most of them nervous. Unperturbed, River had just nonchalantly weaved _Serenity_ through the junk straight to the stranded vessel.

"It's a spy ship," Mal replied with certainty. "The black, carbon composite that makes up her outsides also makes it invisible to radar and even the naked eye out here in the Black."

"Huh, sounds like something you'd want to put on a gunship or something," Jayne observed. Though no expert on ships, the big mercenary knew about fighting. Not being seen while you shot something up was an advantage he could appreciate.

"No point," Kaylee said. "Composite's all fine if'n you don't want to be seen, but it's crappy for anything else. A few entries into atmo, and you'd burn all that stuff right off. You'd be forever gluing the stuff back on." She was the ship's mechanic. She knew this sort of thing.

"Still, it makes sense that the Alliance would be using 'em," Zoë added. She was Mal's second in command of their little boat. "They'd help sniff out Reavers and whistle up reinforcements when they find 'em. But," she pointed at the pilot out there, "that ain't no Alliance uniform I ever heard of."

"Little coffee girl got lost," River said as if in answer. "Her world got blown up by toasters and now she's looking for a childhood fairy-tale."

There was a moment of stunned silence.

"River, have you been taking for medication?" Simon Tam, River's brother, asked doubtfully. He was also _Serenity's_ overtrained medic.

"I'm fine, Simon," River replied with a roll of her eyes and a tone of voice that implied that her brother was being stupid.

They all knew River was some kind of psychic, able to seemingly pluck information out of the Black. However, due to unethical government types playing around in her brain, most of what she relayed back about what she sensed came out as garbled nonsense. She had gotten better since Miranda, but she still had her moments.

Still, her statement might make sense once they figured out what she was talking about. But Mal really didn't feel like taking the time to decipher Riverisms right now. He had more important things to do. Rescuing stranded pilots came to mind.

"Okay, we're all probably going to regret this," Mal said, "but let's be about the rescuing now. We still got a delivery to make and Alliance ships to avoid."

* * *

Her prayers had been answered.

Okay, a god hadn't personally decided to pick Kara up, but it was a ship. It wasn't another of those horror ships, but a human ship. Hell, she could actually see humans on the bridge. What's more, she actually recognized it.

It was _Firefly_.

Well, on second glance, it wasn't actually _Firefly_. For one thing, there was no way Commander Adama or President Roslyn were going to let _Firefly_ leave the Fleet no matter how temporarily. The ship had suddenly become too valuable.

Secondly, Kara could actually see visible and obvious differences between _Firefly_ and this ship. Whereas _Firefly_ had a rusted, worn look about her even before the Colonial Holocaust, this ship practically shined as if it had just come out of a shipyard. There were also a few doodads attached that were different. But the two ships were very similar models, maybe even the same design.

After some discussion, the people on the other ship's bridge came to a decision. The ship adjusted its orientation slightly, raising its nose and presenting its front airlock to her. The front wall that the airlock door was placed in swung down, revealing itself to be a boarding ramp.

Kara hadn't realized that it could do that. She had wondered why _Firefly's_ front airlock was so big. Then again, _Firefly_ had never made planetfall since the Cylons nuked the Colonies.

Kara maneuvered herself back to _Blackbird's_ cockpit. She reached in and pulled out the ship's hard drive. There might be something recoverable on it. Then she launched herself at the other ship's open airlock.

As she floated over, Kara wished she could bring _Blackbird_ with her. But small as her ship was, it was just a little too big to fit in her rescuers' airlock. Still, if she could convince them, maybe Kara could get them to depressurize their cargo bay long enough to open both doors to get Blackbird aboard.

The ship's artificial gravity asserted itself the instant she crossed the threshold of the airlock. With the natural grace that made her the Fleet's finest pilot, Kara landed on her feet. As she did, the ramp closed behind her.

Kara felt her suit deflate as the airlock filled with air. Just to be safe for once, Kara pulled out her oxygen stick. It turned a satisfying green. With that, she immediately yanked her helmet off and inhaled fresh, well fresher air just as the inner airlock door cracked open.

Kara was greeted by three, disreputable people. The man in the middle was obviously the leader. A scruffy looking man with a goatee stood to his left and a dark skinned woman stood on his right. They all had some kind of gun in hand at the ready. They had the courtesy to not actually point the weapons at her.

Kara absently noted that there were several onlookers, but her attention was understandably focused on the three in front of her.

"Hi," Kara said in the friendliest tone she could muster. "Thanks for the lift and all." No response. They just looked at her. "Hey, uh, could you guys put the guns away? I'm no threat to you. Really, I'm not."

The man with the goatee looked confused and muttered something. The leader glanced at the woman and asked her a question. The woman gave a short, clipped reply.

Kara understood not a word they said.


	4. Chapter 3 Violence and Strong Language

Title: The Stars on Fire

By Nopporn Wongrassamee

Summary: Meanwhile, back on the home front…

Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.

**Chapter 3 – Violence and Strong Language**

The blue giant star around which the Alliance had settled never had a proper name. Before colonization, it had a random alphanumeric designation that only an astronomer might know. After colonization, the settlers had simply called it the sun. When they were feeling formal, they called it the Blue Sun to differentiate it from the yellow sun orbited by Earth.

Given over a hundred worlds that could be settled by humans after a little – or a lot – of terraforming, it was no surprise how much space traffic bustled about the Blue Sun system. In truth, outsiders might have been surprised by how little space traffic there actually was. That was because only some thirty worlds could actually produce or at least support spaceships. Another forty odd worlds were still in the early stages of colonization or otherwise too primitive and sparsely settled to support any large scale industry. The rest were undergoing terraforming, earmarked for terraforming, or had failed to be terraformed. In one case, a perfectly habitable world had been evacuated when the population had been fooled into believing that the terraforming was failing.

Still, space traffic was mostly concentrated around the Core. The density of ships tended to trail off as one moved out towards the Rim. This had changed somewhat as Alliance warships moved into the area informally known as Reaver space. But most Alliance citizens would have been surprised to see two ships flash into existence in the interstellar void just beyond the Rim.

One ship was a mid sized cargo ship that would have looked utterly ordinary, both in the Blue Sun system and among the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. It was a basic baton configuration: bridge and crew quarters up front, a long spine along which cargo module were attached, and a cluster of drive pods in the rear.

The other ship was something else. Its main body was a saucer shape. Defining front from rear were three drive pods arranged in an inverted triangle, separated from each other by a series of struts. Gun turrets studded the hull, practically screaming WARSHIP to any outside observer.

Of course, the reason they jumped to this location was to avoid any observers at all. Today, they failed completely.

* * *

"Contact!" CPO Dualla announced to _Galactica's_ bridge. "Unidentified contacts at extreme DRADIS range."

"Cylons?" Colonel Tigh asked. He was the second ranking officer on the ship and by default, the Fleet. Tigh was best suited for this position. He had had a brief stint as the highest ranking officer which proved it.

"Can't say, sir," Dualla replied. "Ship profiles are hard to resolve at this range."

"It could be local starships, sir," Lieutenant Gaeta suggested. "Given the hazards of navigating in this system, it would make sense for ships coming and going to do FTL jumps out here."

"It might be Cylons," Dualla continued. "They're not moving and do seem to be holding position relative to the fleet. Also, it's hard to tell, but one of the ships appears to be disc shaped."

"Which means that if it's Cylon, then it's either a new design or a relic from the first war," Tigh concluded. He snorted in disgust. "Or it might not be Cylon at all. Frak it, either way, we're going to have to send somebody to take a look see. Okay, send the CAP over there and launch the alert fighters to cover the Fleet. Who's on the CAP right now?"

"Hot Dog, Sheba, Racetrack, and… uh, Helo."

"Gods help us all," Tigh muttered. A pilot barely past nuggethood, an actual nugget from the Gods forsaken _Pegasus_, and the Cylon lover. He made a mental note to talk to the Old Man's kid in the future about just who got assigned together on a combat air patrol. "Send them anyway."

"Yes, sir."

"And someone get the Old Man up here."

* * *

"Two languages?" President Roslyn asked, rubbing the bridge of her nose. She was dying, she knew. Even with Kamala, cancer was eating away at her. Roslyn didn't have long to live and they were almost at the end of their journey. She could feel it. Unfortunately, the gods kept dumping these complications on them. "Doctor Baltar, are you sure of that?"

"Yes," Baltar replied. "I really should have seen this sooner and it's obvious once you know what to look for." He called up a graphic on the display. "These are the two character sets that I've identified so far. They're almost never grouped together." On the left side were the alien symbols. On the right were block characters that looked almost familiar.

"That almost looks like Kobollian lettering," Commander Adama observed, giving voice to Roslyn's own thoughts.

"Yes, they are very similar," Baltar agreed. "There are a number of minor differences, but no more than the modern Colonial alphabet. A couple millennia or so of independent evolution could easily account for the differences. In fact, this alphabet actually has fewer changes than ours."

"What about the other letters?" Roslyn asked.

"I haven't made much headway in translating them," Baltar said reluctantly. "I've been concentrating on the Kobollian type writing on the assumption that the two are basically saying the same thing. This other language not only seems to have more characters, even the spoken parts I've been able to identify seem utterly alien."

"Doctor, are you saying that the humans in this system are coexisting with a race of aliens," Adama asked thoughtfully.

Lords, the cancer must be affecting Roslyn more than she thought it was. The possibility of actual aliens hadn't even occurred to Roslyn.

"'Coexisting' might be the wrong term, Commander," Baltar said. For emphasis, he called up some video. "We picked up this fragment just before I called you. From the format, it looked like a news broadcast of some sort. It seemed, ah, important."

The video showed a fleet of what were obviously warships. They were sleeker than something the Colonials might have built, but still looked like ships that humans might build. The ships were above a planet in formation facing away from it. Suddenly, another fleet appeared, charging straight at the first fleet. The ships in the new fleet had a distinctly different design aesthetic, as if built by demons out of hell. At what had to be point blank range, the two fleets started exchanging fire.

Roslyn almost jumped out of her seat when the newcomers started ramming their enemies.

"Lords of Kobol," she murmured. "Have we wandered into another war?"

That was when the sirens went off.

* * *

"_Galactica_, this is Helo," Helo sent. He was ironically the seniormost officer in the CAP, yet he was relegated to his old job as Electronics Warfare officer. But that's what happens when you fall in love with one of the enemy. "Bogey One is definitely some kind of cargo ship. Bogey Two is definitely disc shaped, but it's too small to be a Basestar. It's about half the size of _Galactica_."

"Roger that, Helo," Dualla replied. There was a pause and some muffled background chatter. "Any hostile signs from the Bogeys?"

"Negative, Galactica," Helo replied. "I'm not sure they've even seen us yet. It looks like there some small craft traffic between Bogeys One and Two…" A new blip appeared on his screen, moving at high speed towards the CAP. "Strike that! Vampire! Vampire! Inbound missile on… Holy Frak, that's a _nuke_!"

There was an eternity where nothing seemed to happen.

It was absurd. Nobody wasted nuclear warheads on fighters. It was extreme overkill. Even the Cylons saved nuclear weapons for antiship operations and even then, used them sparingly. As such, there wasn't any real doctrine for fighters to deal with any shot right at them. But some things were just obvious, like attempting to evade.

Which they weren't doing.

"Scatter, you morons!" Helo yelled.

Just like that, the two Vipers and one Raptor split up, trying to put as much distance as they could between each other so that whoever the nuke went after wouldn't kill the other two by proximity.

The missile turned to track Hot Dog. To Helo's amazement, it suddenly and violently veered away from them. It wasn't heading toward anything except…

"New contact!"

* * *

"Son of a whore!" Lieutenant Earl Wyatt, commander of the Alliance Gunship MAG-40013, swore. "Who the humping _gos se_ are these people?"

For an empty piece of interstellar space, the sky here sure was crowded. After destroying a Reaver ship that had been stooging around on the outer edges of the System, Wyatt's sensor tech, Jane Hallahan had spotted an unusual radiation signature that she had claimed looked like a exhaust trail. She had said it looked like these Reavers were using some new fuel that was being experimented with back in the Core called Tibium, Termium, Tyreum… something starting with a T anyway.

Wyatt had been doubtful. It had looked like a sensor ghost at best. But this was the closest thing to a lead anyone had seen in weeks since the Reaver hunt had started. It had led them here.

"I dunno, sir, but the profile doesn't look like Reaver ships," Hallahan replied. "And that sentry they posted just fired a nuke at us."

Wyatt swore again and put his gunship into evasive maneuvers. As the sleek, delta shaped craft swerved jinked aside, his gunnery officer Clint Wood went to work. A stream of tracers flashed out followed by their own missile. There was an explosion, but no blinding flash.

"Got it, sir," Wood announced.

"Okay, I wanna know who these _hwoon dahn _are," Wyatt growled, sending his ship speeding towards the sentry. "Hallahan, get on the horn with _Magellan_ and inform them of our situation."

"Yes, sir."

"Wood," he continued while Hallahan contacted _Magellan_, "get ready to dump some serious firepower on this…"

Gunship MAG-40013 suddenly ceased to exist.

* * *

"Frak! _Galactica_, Bogey Two just destroyed Bogey Three with some sort of energy beam."

"CAP, this is _Galactica_ Actual," Commander Adama said. "You are ordered to return immediately. Do not engage Bogey Two unless it starts moving towards the Fleet."

He was going to have to move the Fleet. From the size and performance of the Bogey Three, it was obviously some kind of fighter. Bogey Three had been faster and more heavily armed than any Viper and Bogey Two had destroyed it with ease. It certainly seemed hostile because the nuclear missile had looked like it had been initially heading towards the CAP. The appearance of Bogey Three had apparently caused a shift in priority. And now that Bogey Three was gone…

"Roger that, _Galactica_," Helo replied. "Returning to…"

Helo's voice cut off so abruptly that for a moment, Adama thought he and Racetrack had been destroyed by Bogey Two.

"_Galactica_," Helo's voice returned. "Bogey Two has just jumped out."

* * *

The modern Alliance Cruiser was designed for the post-Unification verse. They were big, bigger than a good many War and pre-War battleships. They were the most impressive warships ever made in the Blue Sun system. Proponents of the design would point out the unmatched firepower, the fleets of gunships, and the battalions of infantry carried aboard them. This was a ship made to keep the peace. And to intimidate any would-be rebels more, the Cruiser's bulk was inflated even more by its "City on a Platter" design.

The critics said they looked damned silly.

The City on a Platter design might look impressive, but to anyone with even a smattering of engineering know-how, it was an inefficient beast. Even worse for a fighting ship, the design was more _fragile_ compared to a more conservatively designed warship.

Secretly, Commander Harken, commanding officer of the IAV _Enterprise_, agreed with the critics. But it was his ship. No one would ever hear him uttering any insults about his beloved command. After all, with the Independents little more than a memory, there was no one left who had ships that could go toe to toe with the Alliance Fleet.

Unfortunately, that assumption had proven groundless when the Reavers turned up in force, ambushing a concentrated force of older Alliance warships. The battle had been brutal, a nearly one for one exchange in ship losses. The Alliance had only prevailed because they had two or three more ships than the Reavers.

Harken had had some previous exposure to Reaver handiwork, so Reavers being real didn't come as a complete shock. What came as a real shock was that the Alliance had been responsible for the creation of the Reavers in the first place. What was even worse was that so many of his comrades had died unwittingly trying to cover up the crimes of those responsible.

But now the Alliance military was finally fulfilling their responsibilities. Despite the political chaos at High Command, orders had been issued sending ships out to hunt down the remaining Reavers. Post-battle analysis indicated that it was a fluke of local conditions plus the shock of surprise that allowed the Reavers to destroy so many Alliance ships. If they could keep their distance, Alliance ships should be able to destroy the Reaver ships with impunity. With that in mind, the assembled fleet of Cruisers escorted by swarms of gunships swept out and flooded the space around Miranda ready to destroy any Reavers they found.

They didn't find any.

The Cruisers and their attendant gunships scattered, looking for the Reaver fleet that intel had said should have been at Miranda. So far, all they had found were a handful of obvious stragglers. Harken had wondered about the accuracy of the intel.

As a side benefit of the search, _Enterprise_ had been designated as the flagship coordinating the search. Of course, that reduced Harken to the Number Two man on his own ship, but he got to work with a legend.

"Sir, we have a message from _Magellan_," he informed his superior. "They received a garbled message from one of their gunships about a fleet of ships parked out beyond the Rim. It looks we've found the Reaver fleet.

"Good, assemble the fleet," General Sherman Williams ordered. He was a famous hero of the War, leading an Alliance fleet through the Independents' rear areas devastating their war production facilities. He sighed. "Son, do you know why it took so long for any of us to believe in Reavers?"

"Sir?" General Williams was in one of his reflective moods.

"The logistics of the Reavers simply didn't make sense," the General mused. "Psychotic madmen subsisting entirely off human flesh? To feed themselves, the Reavers would have needed to eat so many people that we couldn't help but sit up and take notice. And then there was your supposed encounter with Reavers. They left a perfectly good supply of human bodies right there on that ship. Why didn't they take them? And let's not get into how they keep their ships flying."

"But, they're real, sir," Harken protested.

"Yes, and we drove them mad, made them mindlessly aggressive." Williams sighed. "And yet they're still able to work together without turning on one another. They can operate a space going fleet for years and still feed themselves on something other than human flesh." He smiled humorlessly. "That, or some _tah mah duh hwoon dahn_ was outright supplying the Reavers with food and equipment."

* * *

"You're kidding me," Roslyn said in disbelief.

"No joke, Madame President," Adama replied. "That cargo ship we captured is fully loaded with food stuffs, ship parts, practically everything we're short of except for weaponry. Oh, we're being careful to make sure none of the food is tainted and that none of the machinery is booby trapped, but my people are optimistic. Although we are wondering why one cargo hold was filled with nothing but drums of red paint."

"And there was no sign of the crew?" Roslyn asked.

"No," Captain Lee Adama answered. "We think that the crew transferred over to the warship right after the jump. Although we did find this in the galley." He held up an empty mug stamped with the Starbuck's Coffee logo.


	5. Chapter 4 Impressions

Title: Stars on Fire

By Nopporn Wongrassamee

Summary: Starbuck and the crew of _Serenity_ get to know each other.

Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.

**Chapter 4: Impressions**

"_Thrust_," River said, holding up the winged toy for Kara to see. While making whooshing sounds, she moved the toy forward while miming something coming out the rear end. As River was the ship's pilot, Kara assumed that she was talking about ship movements and not making dirty jokes.

Kara had never seen ship controls with such eccentric decorations in the Colonies. The most she had ever heard of was an urban legend about the pilot who kept fuzzy dice in his cockpit. One of this ship's piloting stations was festooned with small, plastic toy animals.

What were they supposed to be anyway? Some kind of dragons?

"Thrust," Kara replied in her own language, then repeated in River's, "_Thrust_."

"Thrust," River repeated in modern Colonial, beaming at Kara. River had no doubt memorized the word and its meaning in this single lesson. Her memory was amazingly good like that and she always seemed to know what Kara meant while Kara had to struggle with River's language.

Sometimes, Kara wondered if River was a Cylon plant. Maybe she already knew modern Colonial and was only pretending not to. If River was a machine, then she could be programmed with the skill needed to fly a ship, explaining why she could fly the ship at such a young age. Oh, gods, it made so much sense…

"_Roll_," River continued, demonstrating with the toy what she meant, turning it over both ways. She grinned impishly at Kara and winked. "_Roll_," River repeated while nudging the ship's control yoke. Because of the ship's artificial gravity, the deck remained solidly underneath their feet. However, the stars outside appeared to go into a gut wrenching spin. It was gut wrenching because anyone looking outside would have had a bout of nausea as their eyes and inner ear disagreed on what was really happening. Only the best pilots like Kara wouldn't be put off by the display.

Judging by the sound of cursing coming corridor, several members of the crew did not fall under the category of "best pilot".

"_Roll_," River repeated again, throwing a look at the yoke in front of Kara.

"_Roll_," Kara replied. Catching on, she translated to Colonial. "Roll," she said, nudging her own control yoke in the opposite direction. The spinning starscape suddenly started spinning in the other direction. There was more cursing from the rear.

"_What the gorram hell is going on up here?_" demanded the ship's captain as he stormed onto the bridge. Kara still couldn't quite follow what he was saying, but by his tone of voice, it was pretty obvious what he was demanding.

While River placated the man, Kara took a moment to study him out of the corner of her eye. For all that they looked nothing alike, this man sorely reminded her of William Adama. In the few hours that she had been aboard, she had already observed that he had a kind of family relationship with the crew.

From the language impaired introductions she had earlier, Kara had learned that his name was Mal.

* * *

"Zoë?" Mal said calmly, not taking his eyes off the strange woman they had just rescued. "Why didn't I understand a word that she just said?"

"Could be that she didn't speak English or Chinese, sir," Zoë replied.

"What else is there to speak?" Jayne asked.

"There are languages other than English and Chinese," Zoë replied. "They even speak a few of 'em on some worlds." She frowned. "Although I don't know what she said, something about it seems familiar."

"Yes, well, I ain't got time for playing guessing games," Mal groused. To their visitor, he said, "Look, can you speak something we can all understand?"

The woman replied with a gabble of nonsense.

Mal repeated the question in Chinese.

The woman just looked confused. She patted herself with her right hand and repeated the word "Kara".

"Right," Mal muttered. "Amazing as it seems, she don't speak English or Chinese. Anyone have any idea what she's saying?"

"I think she's trying to say her name's 'Kara'," Jayne said.

"Right. Yes. Of course it is," Mal said quickly. "I mean besides that."

"Nope," Jayne replied. "That's all she's saying. Her name's Kara."

* * *

This ship – Kara had gathered from her language lessons with River that it was named _Serenity_ – was odd. There was the weird mixture of the highly advanced and the primitive. Despite their obvious well worn use, the computers and avionics looked to be more advanced than anything the Colonials had ever had. Of course, Kara wasn't a computer expert, but all the displays were touch screens except for the small holographic projector. Even before the First Cylon War, the Colonials had considered touchscreens as expensive toys and freestanding holograms were only a pipedream.

On the flip side, the dining room had featured a wooden table. It wasn't a finely crafted piece of furniture that one might see on a luxury liner like the _Cloud 9_. No, _Serenity's_ table was a rough hewn collection of planks and boards worn smooth through much use. It had obviously been bought on the cheap, but Kara wondered what freak law of economics had made wood cheaper than plastic.

Heading rearward from the bridge, Kara came across Jane sitting at said table. In the Colonies, "Jane" was a girl's name. That this big, burly man was named Jane spoke volumes of the cultural differences between Kara's people and the people who lived in this system.

At the moment, Jane had a truly impressive variety of guns neatly arranged on the table. He had one partially disassembled for cleaning. Back before the Holocaust, Kara had known a few marines who were avid gun collectors. They didn't have anything like the variety Jane had.

She caught Jane's eye and pointed at one of his weapons. "Can I look at that?" she asked.

Jane looked at her suspiciously. Then his eyes darted to Kara's hip where her own sidearm was holstered and asked something in his own language. From her brief lessons with River, Kara thought she caught "I" and a word that might have been "look" or "see".

Praying that she hadn't misinterpreted and was about to get herself shot, Kara slowly drew her own weapon and offered it handle first to Jane. Luck or the gods were with her. Jane accepted with a grin and did the same with the pistol Kara had pointed at.

Examining the alien gun, Kara could not at first figure out how the thing operated. Then she realized that the bullets were held in a revolving chamber. Gun technology had been around almost as long as the Colonies had been settled. The last time she had seen a revolver in person had been in a museum. The Colonies hadn't made any revolvers in centuries except as historical props. This one in Kara's hand not only looked to have been made recently, it was also well used.

Why were these people so advanced in some respects yet so primitive in others? It was a mystery Kara intended to solve.

* * *

This Kara was a mystery.

Zoë didn't like mysteries. Too often in her experience, mysteries had a way of turning around and biting them in the ass. She wanted to know where this woman came from and what she was up to.

While pretending to be puttering around the kitchen, Zoë observed Kara compare weapons with Jayne. Kara was obviously military of some sort. But she didn't speak English or Chinese, didn't have a uniform from any military that Zoë recognized. And although she tried to cover it up, Kara had that wide-eyed tourist look since coming on board.

The clincher was that Zoë didn't recognize Kara's language. Although none of the others knew it, Zoë knew a lot of languages other than English and Chinese. Explaining to the others how she knew so many languages would have been a bit awkward, never mind that she didn't like thinking about it.

Zoë didn't like thinking about the past. There was too much hurt there, especially this soon after Wash… after Miranda. She preferred to live in the Now.

But Kara was military, flying an obviously military ship, without being able to speak to any of the local militaries. The conclusion was obvious. Kara wasn't local; she was from somewhere other than the Blue Sun system.

Of course, the devil was in the details and how to get them. At the moment, Kara couldn't explain even if she wanted to. Zoë could try asking River, but the girl had kept Zoë's secrets as well as Book's whatever they had been. Asking River to reveal secrets was a slippery slope that was best not taken.

For now, Zoë decided that the best bet was to let Kara learn the language. Eventually, she'll learn enough to explain herself. Or she would get kicked off the ship first. Or an emergency would come up forcing the issue. Probably that last one knowing her crew. Any which way, waiting seemed to be the best bet.

After all, Zoë had nothing but time.

* * *

"_Say, ah_," the young man, Simon, said. Okay, he wasn't that young really, maybe around Kara's age. But he had this youthful, naïve air about him that no one from the Colonies had had since the Holocaust.

"Ah?" Kara repeated questioningly.

"Aaaahhhhh," Simon demonstrated by opening up his mouth wide and screwing his face up something fierce.

"Ah…" Kara said doubtfully. In truth, she had been through enough medical exams that she had a general idea of what Simon wanted. She was just having too much fun getting him to make stupid faces by playing dumb. Doc Cottle would never have been so fooled.

As the ship's medic, Simon seemed to know what he was doing and his sickbay was substantially cleaner than the rest of the ship, but Kara wondered what his actual qualifications were. It seemed like all the technical positions on this ship, the pilot, engineer, and doctor, were all staffed by ridiculously youthful personnel. Kara figured that these three must be geniuses in their field, the local star system had an education system that put the Colonials to shame, or _Serenity_'s captain was an idiot.

Unfortunately, the last possibility seemed most likely.

* * *

"Well, Doc?" Mal began. "What do you make of her?"

"Captain," Simon replied. "Kara is a reasonably healthy young woman in her twenties. She has had a knee injury some time in the past that has healed over. There are also some signs of minor vitamin deficiencies in her diet, but nothing serious."

"That's it?"

"Well, I can't tell you anymore without better equipment than what I have here," Simon told him. He made a great show of deep thinking. "Although I suppose we could go looking for an Alliance hospital we could break into for a neural imager to use."

"I'm not that curious, Doc."

"Didn't think you were, Captain."

As Mal headed out the door, he paused and turned back to Simon.

"Doc, they teach you any fancy dead languages in medical school?" At Simon's questioning look, he elaborated. "I mean, I hear medical speak borrows a lot from some dead language or other."

"Greek and Latin," Simon said. "And a lot of modern medical jargon was created from those languages though we aren't taught the actual languages." Now he looked thoughtful for real. "Now that you mention it, Kara's language does seem to borrow a few Greek root words. But that can be said for just about any European language."

"You row what?" Mal said in confusion.

* * *

"Oh my gods…" Kara moaned in horror.

Against all odds, Kara had somehow convinced Mal to take the _Blackbird_ aboard. The procedure had been laborious and involved depressurizing _Serenity's_ cargo bay. But it had been done only minimal damage. Kara had been relieved that she would be able to tell Chief Tyrol that his baby was alright… if one didn't count the ship's inability to power up.

Kara's relief might have been premature. Every panel on the ship was opened up. Parts were strewn everywhere. Kara couldn't even imagine how to put it all back together in shouting distance of working order.

At the sound of Kara's voice, the head of _Serenity's_ engineer popped up from behind the _Blackbird_. "_Hi, Kara_!" Kaylee chirped, beaming a smile at her. She continued with a fast paced chatter in her own language that Kara couldn't follow.

"What have you done?" Kara asked, not in the least bit mollified. "Do you even have any idea what you're doing? This is a highly advanced piece of Colonial technology. I mean sure it was assembled from spare parts, but that doesn't mean you can just take it apart and make it work. You have to be an expert…"

Kaylee reached into the cockpit and flipped a switch. The panels lit up. The ship started humming and lifted several inches to hover off the deck as its grav systems came online. To Kara's practiced ear, the engines whining on standby were running perfectly.

Kaylee turned and grinned at Kara. "_Good?_" she asked.

Kara could only hang her mouth open like a complete loon.

* * *

Mal found Kaylee and River together whispering furiously to each other in the dining room at the corner table. Under normal circumstances, he would assume that they were being friends, discussing girl talk and other Things Men Were Not Supposed To Know. But Mal found it a bit worrisome when his genius mechanic and super genius pilot were doing "girl talk" over what looked to be _Serenity's_ schematics.

Mal casually wandered over to them. That's right. He was completely casual, doing nothing to spook them or make them wary. The girl talk cut off when they noticed him.

"So," he began. "What're you two planning?"

Oh, yeah. He was the soul of subtlety.

The girls glanced at each other. "Planning? We ain't planning anything, Captain," Kaylee said nervously. She was so cute when she was trying to lie. "We're just, uh, um… Hey, did you know that Kara's ship runs on tyleum?"

River face fell into her hands, obviously embarrassed at her friend's clumsy attempt at changing the subject.

"Okay, sure," Mal said, deciding to humor Kaylee for now. "What's tyleum?"

"Oh, it's like this shiny new fuel additive that's being tested in the Core," Kaylee said enthusiastically. "Get's a lot more bang than standard radion cores, even military ones. You could run Serenity for years with the tyleum just in Kara's ship."

"Is that what you're planning?" Mal asked, pointing at the schematics.

"Oh no," Kaylee replied. "We don't wanna do anything too hasty."

"Fuel ratios need to be calculated," River added. "Reactors need to be rebuilt to control tyleum flows. Computers need to reprogrammed with revised engine performance statistics." She frowned. "Not enough data on dynamic quantum nuclear properties of tyleum has been published to make accurate predictions on power output. Probable outcome is runaway reaction resulting in catastrophic containment failure."

"Huh?"

"We'd blow ourselves up."

"Oh, that's bad." Mal took a moment to collect his thoughts. "Don't do that," he ordered, wagging a finger at them.

"Okay, Captain," Kaylee said, cheerful again.

"Now, what were you really doing?" Mal asked.

"Uh… it's a surprise?" Kaylee said hopefully.

"Y'know what, Kaylee?" Mal said patiently. "I hate surprises, especially if they blow us up."

"Well…"

"We're looking to reconfigure _Serenity's_ gravity systems," River interrupted, "to enable superluminal translocation via simultaneous macroscopic quantum shift with no deleterious after effects on ship, cargo, or crew."

"Um…" Mal looked poleaxed. He knew he looked poleaxed. He could follow the first part of what River said and some of the last part. But the middle stuff confused him mightily. "And this won't blow us up?"

"No, Captain," the girls chorused.

"Right," Mal said, nodding sagely as he wandered away. "Keep on with… whatever you're doing."

When Mal was out of earshot, Kaylee turned to River. "How'd you do that?" Kaylee asked.

"Captain is not an idiot," River said wisely. "Captain can tell when he is being lied to. Truth is always better for obfuscation."

"So he didn't understand it when you said we were giving _Serenity_ faster than light ability?" Kaylee asked.

"I believe the term is 'technobabble'," River replied. "Now, if we take the second backup relay here…"

* * *

The Cylon Raider was one of many coasting into the blue giant system. Its parent Basestar had scattered its Raiders widely in order to maximize information gathering. The Raider and its brothers were coming in off plane from where the planets orbited, affording them an excellent look down into the system with minimum obstruction. Also, being off plane minimized any chance encounters with local ships.

In this Raider's case, it had encountered ships anyway. The ships did not fit the profile of Colonial refugees. There were too many of them. Moreover, they were putting out an intolerable amount of radiation.

Standing orders were to avoid contact. The Raider was coasting with its thrusters down. It was also close enough that the strange ships could not possibly miss the thermal plume from the Raider's exhaust. Since the strange ships were ignoring it, the Raider calculated an excellent probability that it had not yet been seen...

The harpoon that impaled the Raider through its brain was made of a strong composite material normally used as bracing component in ship reactor cores. The material had the virtue of being unable to become radioactive during prolonged exposure to radiation. This same property made it virtually invisible to the Raider's standard DRADIS gear.

As one, the Reaver fleet turned, backtracking the now dead Raider's course.


End file.
